Net neutrality legislation could be facing hard times in the 112th U.S. Congress, as many candidates who came out publicly in support of such legislation lost their races on Tuesday. The Daily Caller (via GamePolitics) noted that every candidate who signed the Net Neutrality Protectors pledge lost their bids for the House and Senate. As Daily Caller points out, most of these races were leaning heavily towards pledge-signers’ opponents before the pledge was ever released, so it’s hard to read this as a mandate against neutrality efforts.
Still, the new Congress probably won’t be quite so sympathetic to net neutrality legislation. While we can’t be sure if members of the new Republican-controlled House and nearly split Senate are in favor or not, support for net neutrality tends to be more of a Democratic trait. GamePolitics reports that prominent Republicans like Joe Barton have already taken a stand against net neutrality, classifying it as intrusive government regulation of the Internet. Now the 112th Congress will have the Republican muscle to block efforts to restrict telecommunications companies like AT&T or Verizon.
Net neutrality (and the opposition to it) represents a more subtle political threat to video games than the current Supreme Court case. A lack of legislation imposing net neutrality could mean higher costs for gamers, whose online play is bandwidth-heavy, along with the ability of telecomm companies to throttle load times for their competitors’ sites.
